The Legend of Zelda: Pathways of the Ancestors
by allen.bair
Summary: A rewrite of my very first Zelda crossover novella. The Stargate Atlantis team is drawn into Hyrule's eternal conflict when Princess Zelda is mysteriously brought through the Stargate to Atlantis on Earth. Contains crossover elements from The Legend of Zelda, Stargate: SG-1 and Atlantis; Myst; and The Lord of the Rings.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1 - Beginnings

Once upon a time…

The skinny elvish looking Hylian boy stood by the woman's bedside watching with increasing desperation as the village's healer, Ilio, went back and forth with multi-colored, foul smelling potions and cures. The boy had never seen the woman, Saria, like this before. She was always so full of life. He couldn't ever remember a day when she had taken ill before. And now this? Within a few days?

"Only Fairy's Tears can help this." The healer had said with a resignation that the boy, being only ten years of age, missed.

"Fairy's Tears? Where do I get them?" Link had begged him anxiously.

The upper room of the treehouse where the woman and Link lived seemed to get darker and less inviting than it had been before Saria became ill. Outside, the sun was setting, but Link didn't want to leave his adopted mother's side to even light a candle for them to see properly.

Ilio sighed, and then went to light the candles himself so that he would at least have the light he needed to work by. He hated to dash the boy's hopes. He shouldn't have brought up the Fairy's Tears he now realized too late.

He turned back to the boy, ran his fingers affectionately through Link's reddish blond hair, and then reluctantly told him, "you don't, son. You have to be given them by a Great Fairy, and they don't give them to anyone except those whom they find worthy." The healer hated to dash his hopes, but he couldn't lie to him either. "I'm sorry."

Ilio looked into Link's eyes, expecting to see a loss of hope and despair. Much to his surprise, he found only a serious and calculating resoluteness. The boy's expression said he had been given a chance, however slim, and he was going to take it.

"Where do I find a Great Fairy? I can prove myself worthy." Link spoke solemnly and seriously, as though he weren't just a boy, but a dedicated Hyrulian knight from the Hylian kingdom that extended their rule even as far south as the village's own province of Ordon.

"I've no doubt you can, Link. But the grottoes of the Great Fairies are hidden, and no one living knows where they are now. The last person, Ordonian or Hylian, to see and impress a Great Fairy was hundreds of years ago. It would take months, years perhaps to find one. I'm sorry, son. I should've been more clear. Saria won't last the night. You'd better say your good-byes now."

The boy's hopes were dashed then and there. His mother, the only mother he'd known, was going to die from this strange wasting fever and he could do nothing but just watch it happen. Every instinct in his small but athletic body rebelled against the idea.

He looked down into the pale, elfish face of the thirty-something looking Ordonian woman and stroked her blond hair, tinged with green highlights.

"Link?" She had opened her eyes. Her skin was red with the fever and hot to the touch.

""Mother," he had said, "I'm here, mother." Link sponged some water onto her forehead and dripped some onto her lips.

"Link, I have to go now." She told him.

"I don't want you to, mother." He told her. "I don't want you to leave me."

She looked at him with her violet eyes and said, "Oh my sweet, brave boy. It's time for me to go."

"But why, mother? Why must you go now?" His own forest green eyes were tearing up.

"No one gets to choose when he or she must leave this life for the next, Link. The goddesses have chosen for me, and I must submit to their will. This is not evil, it is just life." She told him. She had always been devout to the goddesses of Hyrule: Din, Nayru, and especially Farore.

"But what will I do without you?" Link asked her, the tears spilling from his eyes. "I'm scared. I don't know what to do."

"Oh my dear, sweet boy, you have a destiny greater than me. I've known that ever since the goddess Farore placed you in my care. Look at the birthmark on your hand." She told him.

Link took his glove off and looked at the mark on his left hand. His mother had always made him cover it up before. It was a faintly golden outline in the shape of three equilateral triangles, two at the base and one at the apex, set together to make one whole triangle. She didn't want him showing it to anyone who came from outside of the village. In the village, only a few people knew about it and kept it quiet.

"What does my birthmark have to do with anything?" He asked, confused.

"Everything." She said solemnly. "You bear the mark of the gods, Link. You carry a special power within you given by the goddesses. When you need it, you will have the courage, the power, and the wisdom to do great things that no one else could dream of doing. Remember that, my sweet Link. You are special, and one day all of Hyrule will depend on you."

She coughed once, then twice. Flecks of blood formed on her lips.

"I love you my Link, I will see you again. Walk with the gods..." And then the light left her own emerald eyes and she was gone.

The whole village had mourned her passing, even though, like Link, she had been a stranger of a different race when she had first come to live with them, her past as mysterious as Link's own. Like the boy, she alone of all those in the village had the telltale high cheekbones, almost too perfect figure and long tapered ears of the elvish Hylian peoples far to to the north. She had been a mid-wife, a healer, and an herbalist in her own right, caring well for the Ordonian's sick and injured, and had in time become dearly loved by all of them.

The funeral pyre in the village square had burned for hours as Link watched her body be consumed by the flames, releasing her spirit to continue its journey onward. Later, though he kept it to himself for fear no one would believe him, he would swear that he had seen a green wisp of smoke, rise from her body in the barely perceptible form of a woman, blow him a kiss, and then vanish.

"Good-bye mother." He had said with tears in his eyes.

He took off his glove and touched the triangle mark on his hand. It made him feel better. It always made him feel braver.

And now he was alone. The other people in the village all gathered around him protectively. He had eaten supper at every dinner table in the village. He had been given offers to come live with almost every family. He appreciated every one of them, but he just couldn't do it. There was too much to understand. It was too soon. He needed to understand what her last words to him had meant.

The new sunlight outside poured through the open windows. The perfumed smell of the morning mist mingling with the herbs and grasses came wafting through. He sat on his bed looking around the simple tree house. that morning.

Saria had lived in it long before Link had come to her. It was special because it hadn't been built by cutting wood and hauling it up, but it had been grown from the tree itself by magic. Saria had never explained more than that. The walls, shelves lined with books, windows, and the door were all seamless with the living tree. So was the nook where she had laid him as a baby wrapped in blankets. A few pieces of furniture were places around the room. A table with a couple of chairs, two beds on opposite sides of the house, a big stuffed chair where Saria would read to him for hours. How he loved the stories of the knights of Hyrule long ago!

But the stories he loved the most were those about the Hero he had been named after. He was enraptured by these stories when he found out that he shared the same name as the Hero. These were the great legends of Hyrule. His mother said they were hidden legends that most people didn't know.

The Hero was born about every two or three hundred years or so. Sometimes it would be longer, sometimes the time would be shorter, but always when he was needed. When she would tell those stories he would imagine himself as the hero and his mind would fill with images of him slashing at monsters and riding from one end of Hyrule to the other. There were times he felt like he had actually been to those far off places and he could see them clearly in his mind's eye as though remembering them from yesterday. His mother had called the stories collectively the _Legend of Zelda_. Link thought it would have been better named after the Hero, rather than the princess who always needed saving, but she was insistent about it.

"The princess is the most important person of the story," she would say.

"Why?" He asked. "The princess is always getting captured and the Hero does all the work rescuing her."

"That's true," she would giggle girlishly, "but there's a reason why the Demon King is always trying to capture her, and it's as old as the land of Hyrule itself." And then Saria would frustrate him by never explaining more than that.

The house was quiet now. There would be no more stories from her. He could read the old books himself, but it wasn't the same. His mother's voice had given a life to them and had awakened things within him that just his reading alone couldn't.

There was always something different about his mother's voice, everyone said so. When she spoke, there was always a power behind it that no one could place, and no one could deny. When she spoke sweetly and kindly, you could get lost in her words. When she gave a command, you moved to obey before your mind had time to react. He knew of no other woman like her, and was sure he wouldn't again. Her favorite color was green, and even her blond hair seemed tinged slightly with emerald highlights when caught in the light. The house was too quiet, and too empty now without her.

The village goat-herder had offered him a job helping him tend the goats, and in exchange he was teaching Link to break and ride a chestnut, two year old mare with white markings that the goat-herder hadn't found a good use for otherwise yet. The mare had been given to the old goat-herder as payment for goats bought by a horse ranch farther north near Castle Town, but she proved too spirited for him or anyone else to handle until she met Link. She just took to the boy quickly, but refused to cooperate for anyone else.

Link had named her "Epona" after the Hero's mount, although, like himself, she was still pretty young. Though he knew it wasn't practical, there were times he continued to dream they would both grow up to have adventures together just like the Hero.

He got up from the bed and went to the cabinet to take out some cheese and a loaf of bread from last night's dinner with the mayor and his daughter. The Mayor's daughter, Ilia, was Link's age, and while they had always been friends she, more than anyone, seemed to understand what he had been going through with the loss of his mother. Her mother had died two years before from the fever as well. He set the cheese and bread on a wooden plate on the table under the window and sat down to eat, watching the birds and small animals scurry around down on the ground as they went about their business.

"Where am I?" This was the first thought that went through the lithe young elvish girl's mind as she opened her royal blue eyes. The sounds of whispered voices speaking in strange, nonsensical, harsh sounding words echoed in her long, tapered Hylian ears

In her immediate view and over her head were strange luminescent strips of light set into a gray green metallic ceiling. They gave off a soft light, enough to see well by, but not enough to hurt one's eyes should they look at them. She was certain she had never seen devices like them before anywhere, magical or otherwise. Still, in spite of this they felt vaguely familiar and gave her a sense of deja vu, like from a dream she had once upon a time, but could not remember the details of.

Not knowing where she was, or if anyone nearby might be friend or foe, she turned her head slowly and discreetly from one side to the other so as not to attract attention, moving her eyes more than her head itself. The room she was in was a large chamber with more metallic gray walls trimmed with rosewood paneled pillars at the corners. What looked like small windowed mirrors outlined in black were placed in different positions on the walls and on stands around the chamber. These glowed with words and squiggily colored lines. The words were written in a script which she could not identify from any of the known languages her royal tutors had been attempting to teach her. On metallic side tables against the wall, she could see small metal instruments wrapped in a transparent material, and small bottles with labels on storage shelves.

She tried to sit up and found herself sliding back to the strange, narrow white bed she had been laid on. Her knee length pink and silvery silken dress held no traction against the white sheets she was laying on, and neither did her matching leggings. A thin, possibly woolen, off white colored blanket covered her from the abdomen down.

Nearby, several Ordonian adults, distinguishable by their short, rounded ears, wearing long white coats with what looked like blue or green uniform shirts on underneath came rushing to her to help her gently lie back down. They were calling to each other pointing at her as they came, but she couldn't understand the words.

"Where… where am I?" She asked them, her voice more groggy than she actually felt.

One of the adults was a woman, clearly another Ordonian but one who had long, golden blond hair and high, Hylian like cheekbones like herself. She unsettled the girl, as though she was seeing a ghost. Looking at her reminded the girl of images of her queen mother that she had seen in paintings which hung in the royal residence of Hyrule Castle. She had never known her mother. Her late majesty had died giving birth to her. The Hylian girl shrunk back into the bed in alarm at this, and all the other strange adults around her inspecting the strange black mirrors, and crowding around the bed.

Seeing this, the woman standing over her sent the others away and, pulling a nearby metal stool closer to her bed, she sat down next to her and took the girl's hand gently. She then began trying to speak to her more slowly in a calm, soothing tone of voice.

The girl looked at her with a blank, but studious stare, and eventually shook her head slowly trying to indicate that she didn't understand a word that the woman who looked so much like her mother was saying.

The woman smiled a compassionate, almost maternal or sisterly compassionate smile. The next thing she did was point at herself with the index finger of her slender right hand and say, "Jennifer."

She then pointed at the Hylian and spoke three unintelligible but distinct words more slowly.

_She wants to know my name._ The girl realized.

Taking Jennifer's cue, the girl pointed back at herself and said with her Castle Town Hylian accent, "Zelda."

For a brief moment, Zelda thought should have said or added, "Princess Zelda of the Royal Family of Hyrule," but looking at this woman and what surroundings she could see, Zelda doubted that it would be helpful to either of them. Everyone in Hyrule and its surrounding lands that she knew of spoke Hylian. Everyone that would know her name spoke Hylian. This woman clearly didn't.

She tried to experiment with communicating with this woman who was trying to be kind to her and prayed to the goddess that she would understand. She pointed to the woman and repeated her word, "Jennifer."

The woman nodded her head in affirmation and said "uh-huh," positively.

She then pointed at herself again and said, "Zelda." She then pointed at the mark on her left hand, the seal of the Royal family and added "Princess Zelda" to see if there was any recognition in Jennifer's eyes.

The woman seemed confused, but her eyes told Zelda that she understood that it meant something important somehow.

_Good, she'__s__not __witless._ Zelda thought to herself.

The princess knew many people in her household staff who were dear to her, but were completely incapable of solving even the simplest problems. She had the sense this woman would not be one of them. She could work with that.

Zelda then swept her right hand in wide half circle around her to include the entire room, and then pointed straight at the floor, shrugged her shoulders and said slowly, enunciating every word, "Where am I?" Though now knowing that she wouldn't comprehend the sounds, she hoped the woman would pick up on what she was trying to ask.

Jennifer's eyes followed the motion of Zelda's hand trying to understand what she was doing as the princess looked her in the eyes. It took a few seconds for Jennifer to realize what she meant, and then her eyes reflected her understanding.

She repeated Zelda's sweeping gesture, ending with pointing at the floor and said, "Atlantis." She then pointed straight down and said, "Earth."

Again, that same feeling of familiarity and deja vu filled her at the first name the woman gave her. For some reason she knew this word, _Atlantis_, and it awoke feelings of home and sadness within her that she couldn't explain but were very real and powerful. A single tear formed in the corner of her left eye on the mere mention of the name of this place, but her ten year old mind could not explain to her why.

She knew the names of every land in their world. Her father had ensured that she had been schooled in the geography and politics of their world. But she was certain, in spite of the strange and sudden feelings they awoke, these were names she had never heard. They sounded as alien to her mother tongue, as the gibberish the woman spoke.

She looked at the woman carefully. She looked so Hylian, except for her rounded ears which marked her as one of the people of the southernmost province under Hyrule's authority. She had only seen a few Ordonians in her lifetime, and those only visited Hyrule Castle on official business. Built very similarly to Hylians, in addition to their stunted ears Ordonians tended to be a little stockier and less physically refined than Hylians, but they were a good, hardworking people that had proven valuable assets to Hyrule's kingdom time and again.

Zelda brought her hand to her own ears. They extended out from her head and ended in tapered points just as they had always done. She then, slowly reached out to touch Jennifer's ears which were exposed by her hair being pulled back into a pony-tail. The woman kindly let her, gibbering at her softly. She could feel no scars or obvious mutilations. These ears were natural. This woman was born this way. She then moved her eyes to some of the other people who were standing off in other parts of the room. They were of every color and size it seemed, although all looked basically Hylian except for their strange rounded ears.

Looking again at the chamber around her, the room she was in was copper and gray colored with several of the white beds like her own in a row and many of what looked like mechanical devices and the strange black mirrors and windows with bright colors and words positioned all over the room and mounted to the walls. She saw no one else that she recognized, and no one who was like her in the room, and she couldn't ask how she got here. Or could she?

Looking at Jennifer again, she saw a kindness and curiosity in her pale green eyes. There was no malice or malignant intent in them. Zelda felt that she could could be trusted. She _needed_ to trust her to learn more about where she was and how she arrived there. But how to ask?

She thought for a moment how to frame her question with gestures so that the woman would understand, but couldn't think of any way to do it. Without any common frame of reference, any kind of a real conversation was impossible.

Then the back of her right hand suddenly began to itch. At first, it was just a mild irritation, but it grew quickly into something she couldn't ignore.

She looked at the triangle mark on the back of her bare hand. The golden outline of her birthmark was glowing with a luminescence she had rarely experienced before in her ten short years. The Triforce was the seal of the royal house, and that was all most people, common or noble alike, thought the mark meant, that she was born royal.

Zelda, however, had known how much more it meant. Somehow, she had always known, since before she could talk. She guarded a sacred, divine power that had been her constant companion and teacher all of her life. And at that moment, she knew it was prompting her to call on the Wisdom of her patron goddess, Nayru.

As she looked at the kindly woman in front of her, that Wisdom told her that she had the need now. She closed her eyes and touched the triangle on her left hand with her right and prayed to her goddess silently and within herself. As always before when she had reached out to Nayru, she felt a kind of maternal touch reach back lovingly from her deity to answer.

_I need to know the speech of these people, great Nayru,_ she prayed, _grant me the knowledge and wisdom I seek._

The triangle glowed with a bright golden white energy under her touch and power flowed through her body and into her mind, unlocking and opening pathways she didn't know existed before now.

"What was that?" The woman said in surprise, staring at the girl's hand.

Zelda opened her eyes. She understood the words perfectly. She then tested her new language. "Can you understand me now?" The words were heavily accented from her own tongue, but intelligible she was certain.

"Yes!" Jennifer exclaimed in surprise. "How did you do that? What did you do?"

"It is an ancient magic of the Royal Family." She told her matter of factly, then changed subjects quickly, adopting a tone more befitting her royal station. "I need to know how I arrived here. How far are we from Hyrule? What happened to my royal bodyguards? Why am I the only Hylian here?"

"I don't know." Jennifer said taken aback with the new development and questions. "You came through the Stargate... um... the Ancestral Ring unconscious like you had been thrown. We still don't know how you made it through our iris shield."

"What is an Ancestral Ring? A Stargate?" Zelda asked.

"Uh, _chappa'ai?_" Jennifer tried again.

Zelda shook her head, not recognizing the still foreign word.

"You don't know what a Stargate is?" Jennifer asked.

"No." Zelda responded.

"So then you wouldn't know the gate address you came from then, I take it?" She then said.

Zelda shook her head again, "No. I don't know what that is."

"Well, you're still not completely better. You hit your head on the floor pretty good when you came through. I still don't know why you were unconscious, and there's some other people who will want to talk to you, Zelda. So for right now, you're going to have to stay put in the medical center and get better." Jennifer told her.

"Are you a healer?" Zelda asked.

She thought for a moment, and then nodded her head. "Yes, you could say that. Here I'm called a Doctor." She said.

"Thank you for your kindness Doctor Jennifer. I'm certain I can well compensate you for your trouble once I am able to return home." Zelda told her.

Jennifer smiled and said, "Let's worry about you getting better first, then we can talk about the bill." She then added, "Are you hungry?"

Zelda thought for a minute, then said, "Yes."

"I'll have a tray of food sent up. Once you're well rested, we talk more about where you're from and how to get you home, okay?" She said in a friendly way.

"Thank you, Doctor, I'm sure the food will be delightful." Zelda said.

Jennifer smiled, and then left Zelda to her thoughts.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2 - Remembrances

Link sat with melancholy at the small wooden table, only large enough for two, grown out from the living tree of his and Saria's treehouse. The sun had risen fully and was streaming bright sunlight through an open window nearby. A breakfast of cold pumpkin pastry which had sat wrapped in butcher's paper on a brown ceramic plate, made for him the previous evening by the swordmaster's wife, had all but been demolished by the boy. Crumbs and a few traces of crust were all that remained to convince anyone the pastry had ever existed. The core of an apple, and a small, empty bottle that had contained milk sat next to the plate on the table.

The wooden chair opposite his own across the table was empty, just as it had been for the past several days since Saria's passing. The emptiness of the chair in front of him seemed to reverberate around the treehouse in such a way as to make the home he grew up in almost strange and foreign to him, as though somehow it could no longer be his home anymore, but it was all he had left. And it was all he had left of her.

"Link!" A familiar man's voice called from outside the window nearby.

Link rose up from where he sat to confirm who the owner of the voice was who was calling him. Looking through the window, he saw Rusl, the village's swordmaster and blacksmith marching quickly and with purpose towards his house. He wore his usual forest green tunic over a white pair of calf length breeches and hobnail sandals. A white headband was tied around his forehead, keeping his graying dark blond hair out of his eyes. His own well used, and well honed sword lay in its scabbard on his back.

The swordmaster was a tall, muscular man with a slight mustache and thin beard. He walked with a short walking stick that served at times as a crutch for the limp in his left leg. Link had asked him once how his leg was hurt, and the swordmaster had replied only that it was a long time ago during the border wars with the all-women Gerudo clans of the Lanayru desert. He usually wore a cheerful smile on his face when he came to see Link.

Link liked Rusl, and always had. It was Rusl who had the responsibility of teaching all the boys in the village how to handle a sword, and he always encouraged Link to push himself harder in what the swordmaster called his "natural talent" with a blade. Even though Rusl and his family were Ordonian like the rest of the village, under Saria's watchful eye Rusl had taken Link under his wing as a father figure when Link was still very small, and he and Rusl's son Colin had grown up almost like brothers, though Link was several years older. Rusl's wife had been almost a second mother to him as well.

Link watched his surrogate father's face as he walked quickly up the hill to the tree house. His usually confident smile was gone, and a look of concern and haste had replaced it.

_Something's not right_, Link somehow knew instinctively as soon as he saw him.

"Link!" Rusl called out with both hands cupped around his mouth. "Link are you up yet!" He was insistent. "Link I need you to come down as soon as you can! Link!"

"I'm here, Rusl!" Link called down through the open window. "I just ate! I'm coming down!" He shouted back.

Link then came back from the window and hurried down the short stairs to the lower level of the house where his bed and clothes were kept. Going to his old, metal band and wood chest where he kept his few clothes, he rummaged through them and quickly drew out his forest green tunic, the one Saria preferred, and a pair of white woolen breeches. Throwing them on and tying a simple leather belt around his waste, he pulled on his calf high leather riding boots and rushed down one more level to the door of the tree house, and down the ladder to meet Rusl on the ground.

"Link," Rusl began, breathing somewhat heavily, "I need you to come with me now to the mayor's house."

"What's wrong?" Link asked. "Did I do something wrong?"

Link didn't know why he had asked that question, he couldn't think of what his offense might have been, but the mayor was the person who judged disputes in the village and meted out punishments. Usually when someone was called to the mayor's house, it meant they did something they weren't supposed to.

Rusl shook his head, "No, my boy. It's not that. Someone has come to the village, someone very important. A Sage. She's asked specifically for you, Link." Rusl told him.

Link expected his friend to break into his usual friendly smile, but Rusl's face and tone of voice remained serious and stern. Even if Link wasn't being summoned because he had done something wrong, Rusl's manner did nothing to dispel the feeling that he was.

"A Sage? Why is she asking for me?" Link asked.

"She didn't say. But the Sages don't leave their temples lightly, son." Rusl said, putting his free hand on Link's shoulder. He then added, "My boy, if a sage has left her temple to come and see you, you don't keep her waiting."

The swordmaster then put his whole arm around Link's shoulder and led him down the hill towards the rest of the village. Link looked reflexively back at his treehouse and had the sickly feeling that he would never see it again.

The walk back down the hill towards the village was quieter than the boy liked. Rusl would often speak with him, tell him of his own adventures when he was younger and a soldier in the Hylian army. He would talk of Castle Town, Eldin province, the Gorons and the Zora and all the wonders he had seen in his time away from Ordon. Link loved every minute of it. Rusl told no stories this time. No jokes or humor were to be found in his eyes. The look on his face remained grave and somber.

"What temple is this Sage from?" Link asked, not able to bear the silence anymore.

The Hylian boy knew of the Sages from the stories his mother had read to him. They were the mysterious spiritual guardians revered and respected by all of Hyrule. Each Sage was responsible for a certain individual aspect of the world like fire, or water, or the forest and could be called from any of Hyrule's many races. He knew they remained in their temples scattered throughout Hyrule to guard their world's Sacred Realm with their prayers and songs. Few living had ever seen a sage, even the Sage of Light who remained in the great Cathedral of Light in Castle Town had been seen only rarely outside of his temple. For that reason, many of the common people in the outlying provinces of Hyrule's dominion, even in their small village, believed them to be myths made up by the royal family of the Hylian people.

"She is the Sage from the oldest of the temples deep in the Faron woods to the north of us; the Temple of Time. She hasn't left her temple in living memory, son." Rusl responded gravely.

"But then how does she eat? Doesn't she get lonely?" Link asked those questions only a ten year old boy would dare to ask.

"The Sages aren't like you and I, Link. No one knows or understands the Sages but the Sages themselves." The sword master answered him mysteriously. A tinge of fear and reverence laced the old warrior's voice as he spoke briefly of them and quickly became silent again.

Then Rusl said nothing more as they entered the village.

Their village was a collection of red tiled roof, rounded wooden houses connected by dirt paths gathered together on the north side of a naturally walled valley. A large stream meandered its winding way around the houses and under small bridges to empty into a large pond glistening in the morning light on the south side of the valley. Rusl kept his arm around the boy's shoulders protectively as he guided him along those familiar, well trodden dirt paths.

After what felt like the longest walk Link had ever taken, the two came up to the wooden door of the Mayor's house. Rusl didn't bother knocking but opened the large round door and led Link inside to a dimly lit large sitting room. Well used cushioned couches and chairs, enough for ten or fifteen people were arranged around a short table, and here Link remembered again that much of the village's legal business, both internal and when dealing with other villages and royal representatives was done here in this room.

Sitting on two of those chairs in the main room were the Mayor's large, muscular wrestler's frame and the smaller, more bookish man, the healer Ilio who had tended to Link's mother. These two men sat with obvious, though respectful discomfort opposite an old woman that Link had never seen before. They had all been silent, their expressions grave when he and Rusl had entered. With the addition of Rusl, the swordmaster, they made up the three most important leaders in the village.

Adding to the boy's sense of foreboding, Link couldn't see any trace of Ilia, the mayor's daughter. She was the same age as Link, and they had been close friends since they were both very young. Her presence would have been at least some comfort to him as he was made to stand next to Rusl across from where the Mayor sat.

There was something vaguely familiar to him as he came to look at her. He couldn't explain quite why, but he felt as though he _knew_ her as from a dream or… or… He couldn't place it. She was hunched over under a red cloak which covered most of her body and hid most of her deeply tanned, wizened face, creased with her extreme age, in it's folds. The distinct traces of the long tapered ears of the Hylian race could be seen against the material of her robe's cowl. A long silver-gray braid of hair spilled out from the cowl to flow down and end in a tightly wound spiral across the front of her crimson robes which were emblazoned with the violet insignia of an open eye shedding a single tear. Under the robes could be seen deep, midnight colored garments trimmed with golden runes and patterns.

_She must be hundreds of years old_. Link thought upon first seeing her. He had never seen anyone as ancient as she appeared.

And then from the recesses of his mind, a thought pushed its way to the surface of his conscious mind, _Thousands, not hundreds._

The elder Sage before him sat unmoving like stone in the worn leather cushioned chair, her arms extended in a relaxed manner across its arms. For just a brief moment, Link imagined she might have expired in the time it took to fetch him.

The mayor and the healer looked as if they didn't know what to say or how to even speak in her presence. As Link stood next to Rusl, the mayor's eyes went to the boy as though pleading for help in how to proceed without offending the ancient one.

"Is this the boy, swordmaster?" She then broke the silence, her head moving under the crimson cowl to address Rusl, her voice heavy with age and gravelly. There were no courtesies, no pleasantries, and no smiles.

"Yes." Rusl answered stiffly, but respectfully. "This is Link." Rusl then added, "His mother just passed away, your grace." His tone of voice was hopeful that this might engender some compassion towards the boy to mitigate whatever designs the mysterious woman might have on him.

"Stand in front of me, boy." She told him. If Rusl had hoped for a trace of warmth or sympathy from her, he was disappointed, for there was none in her voice.

Link moved to stand directly in front of her without a will of his own, looking up at Rusl for help. But Rusl had no help to give him. No one except perhaps the royal family held any power over the Sages of Hyrule. He was made to stand opposite her, and his young eyes were able to see more of her face beyond the shadows of her cowl. Her eyes were a sharp golden color, intelligent, and keen. The cheekbones of her ancient face were high, just like his, and he knew then for certain that they were of the same race.

"Let me see your hand, boy." She told him brusquely.

He lifted his right hand and showed its palm to her in technical obedience. But from deep within, a voice told him, _You know which hand she wants to see._

She batted the wrong hand away and said, "Don't try my patience. Show me your left hand, boy."

Link then brought up his left hand which still wore the glove his mother had insisted upon to hide his birthmark.

"Remove the glove." She said, neither impressed nor fooled by it.

He obeyed hesitantly, and gave her his hand again. She studied it carefully.

"How old are you, boy?" She asked him.

"Ten, ma'am." He responded.

Under her cowl, he saw her lift an eyebrow at him, "Ma'am?" She asked. "Are you still so impertinent, boy?"

"The proper address for a Sage is 'your grace,' Link." The mayor said.

"I'm sorry," Link said nervously. "Ten, your grace."

"Ten. So young. I had hoped he would be older by now. But the Princess is ten now too, isn't she? Yes, they're always the same age, but there's nothing to do about it this time." The sage spoke more to herself than to anyone else.

_What does the princess have to do with me?_ Link asked himself, but something within him made him keep his question to himself.

"You will need your horse boy. We have a journey to make." The Sage told Link.

Link's eyes flew first to Rusl and then to the Mayor pleading for help, not knowing what to do.

Rusl then stepped forward, placing his hand once again protectively on Link's shoulder and asked, "Where are you taking him, your grace, and when will he return?"

The Sage raised both her eyebrows and looked up into his eyes, her cowl falling back from her head just a bit so that her eyes met Rusl's own, "I am not used to being questioned, swordmaster." She told him coldly, her face set like stone.

Rusl started to take a step back, an expression of fear flashing across his features, but then steadied himself and held his ground. His grip tightened on the Hylian boy's shoulder while his other hand balled tightly into a fist. The Ordonian man summoned up his courage, and stared her down.

"Link is like my own. I want to know where the boy is going, and when he will return, your grace." He demanded.

The Sage held his gaze like stone for several minutes as they challenged one another silently like two combatants on the field of battle.

Then, her own expression softened.

"I like you, swordmaster," she said, allowing a smile to cross her lips. "You remind me of someone I knew a long time ago."

Rusl softened his own gaze as well, and then said, "Please, your grace. This boy is from our village. We all feel responsible for him."

She looked from the sword master to the faces of the mayor and the healer and could read in their eyes the truth of what he said. She let out a long low sigh, and for a moment every year she had lived could be read in her face, and the count was considerable.

"I have no answers to your questions, I'm sorry." She told them. "And I can't give you what I do not myself possess. If I could say the boy would be safely returned to you I would do so. But his fate does not lie in my hands, but in the hands of those far more powerful and ancient than I."

She looked at Link tenderly now, almost grandmotherly. The change in her expression was so drastic that he wondered for just a brief moment if it was even the same woman. A recognition of her features struggled to break free within him, but he couldn't quite bring it to the surface.

"I had hoped you would be older by this point, but time is now against the both of us. Once, we would have had all the time we needed, but this… things are different. The cycle has been interrupted. Someone has interfered with the legend in a way that threatens everything and everyone." She looked straight into his eyes as she said this last part.

_The legend?_ Link's mind then began to spin at high speed and react in ways that it never had before.

"What cycle, your grace? What legend?" The mayor asked.

"The boy knows," she said, "don't you boy?" She looked in his eyes.

He _did_ know, from the stories his mother had read him, and… There was something else racing through his mind as though testing the walls of a prison, trying to break free.

The boy then nodded, but even that slight motion began to make his head throb, and his hands went to his head to try and cradle it and stop the pressure. "The legend of Zelda." The boy responded in a whisper. "Like from my mother's book."

"What's the legend of Zelda?" The Mayor responded in confusion. When the old woman wouldn't answer, he turned to Rusl with his question. "What does her highness, the Princess have to do with this?" Rusl shook his head in reply, not knowing the answer himseld.

"I don't understand what this is about." The big man continued in helpless frustration.

"You know now why I've come, don't you, boy?" She asked, ignoring the other men in the room now. "You're the Link."

Link stepped back from the Sage trying to take this in. His mind felt as though it were on fire as images and feelings just out of reach raced across it like… He knew the stories. He knew what the Link in those stories did. Terror and excitement seized him.

He touched his finger to the triangle on his hand to make himself feel better, braver. It always seemed to work before like that. He began to feel dizzy, and pain gripped the deep inside of his head.

As he did he mouthed silently a prayer, not to Farore to whom his mother had taught him to pray, but to his mother hoping that she could hear him somewhere, "Mother, help me."

The triangle on his hand then burst out with an energetic bright white golden light, and a new courage seized him and wouldn't let go. Within his mind it was like a dam had ruptured and memories flooded into his consciousness which he could never have lived in his ten few years. He had seen Castle Town. Not once, but many many times. He had ridden the wind on the back of a great bird, and run through the twilight on four paws. He knew the darkness of the shadow temple, and the wonders of Skyloft, the ancient city in the sky which now only existed in legends and whispers. He knew love, and loss. It all deluged him hard and fast in a blur of images and feelings that he tried to make sense of. There were hundreds of lifetimes of memories that tried to integrate into the person he believed himself to be, and all of them were from a person, a personality known only as "Link."

"Yes, boy. You do know." The Sage of Time said with a knowing look. "I can see it in your eyes. You remember."

Link nodded slowly as the pressure began to subside. He tried to sort out his memories, but they were all beginning to fuse together. He was all of those heroes who had come before him, and yet he was still just the boy from the village.

Nodding in satisfaction, the old woman then turned her attention back to the other men in the room.

"He will need a sword and a shield," the Sage said, looking at Rusl, "a real sword and shield. Not those wooden sticks you have the children practice with."

Rusl began to protest that he was too young, and then, reflexively, he looked at Link's face and into the boy's eyes. The swordmaster then stepped back from Link, loosing his grip on the boy's shoulder.

What he saw in the ten year old's eyes unnerved him. The boy he knew and loved was still in there, present somewhere, but now there was something, _someone_ more.

The expression Link carried was no longer that of the scared ten year old boy he had led there. This person's eyes were hardened and haunted as though he had seen things that would give most men nightmares. There was something feral yet dutiful about it. It was the expression he saw on the faces of his fellow soldiers many years before during the border wars, veteran soldiers, when they came back from combat against bokoblin raiders or Gerudo thieves, if they came back at all.

Rusl wanted to weep for what he saw now in the eyes of this boy he had helped to raise. This boy that now stood in front of him could split a man in two without hesitation if the need arose, and looked like he knew how it felt to do so.

"Alright." Rusl said, chilled by the change he saw come over the boy.

"Fetch the boy's pony." The Sage then ordered.

"Epona doesn't belong to me," Link told her, his voice somewhat raspy. "She belongs to the goat-herd."

Without a word, the Sage drew a larch leather pouch out from the folds of her robe and tossed it to the mayor. When he opened it, he found it was filled with precisely cut white, orange, and violet gemstones. They were known as _rupees_, the common currency of the kingdom of Hyrule, and there was enough there to buy the entire village and still live comfortably for several years.

"Give this to the goat-herd as compensation for the horse. The boy must have her." The Sage said with a dismissive wave of her hand.

The mayor nodded quickly. He had never seen so much money in his life.

"Now, let go collect the boy's horse and anything else he might need," she said, eyeing Rusl, "we have a long journey ahead of us and I don't know how safe the woods are anymore."

Rusl nodded wordlessly as he came to accept the loss of any power he had in protecting and nurturing the boy. The boy's fate had been decided by the divine and now the divine had come to claim him for their own purposes. Within himself he submitted to their will, and let the boy go, grieving silently within himself.

She then stood up from her chair. Her frame was bent over, but Link could tell that at one time she had been a tall, powerfully built woman. When she moved, in spite of her age, her limbs moved with a fighter's grace and natural stance.

The recognition then came freely to his mind as he imagined the younger, tall and strong, deeply tanned warrior woman with silver hair and golden eyes his memories told him he had known. Fierce, mysterious, and absolutely dedicated to her Lady goddess, she had been one of the last of her tribe of shadow warriors once upon a time.

"I know you." Link told her as his memories began to settle down and congeal.

He was certain he recognized her now. The memory came back to him.

"Yes." She said as she took his arm and, ignoring the others in the room, they walked through the door of the Mayor's house to the outside. From their, Link was made to lead her up towards the ranch where the pony was kept. "That was many years, many lifetimes ago."

"Impa." He said.

She looked at him and nodded.

He tried to put the pieces together in his mind as many ancient memories fell into place. But there was one memory which was distinctly absent. He had no memory of Impa or any Sage ever coming to seek him out before. He was always raised as an unknown commoner far away from his people and the royal family that guarded the legend.

"How did you find me?" He asked Impa.

"I had help from an old friend." She replied, but did not elaborate.

"It's worse than before, isn't it?" He asked, realizing what it meant. "That's why you came to find me this time instead of letting things take their course.

He didn't know what could be worse than the things his mind told him he had experienced lifetimes ago, but he knew that had to be be. That was the only possible explanation for her to risk leaving the unique environment of her temple this far away from it; that is, at her extreme age, for her to risk her very life.

She didn't answer. She didn't need to. If Impa had left her place at the temple, then he had his answer.

"So, young lady, I understand you're feeling better." It wasn't a question that the balding man with spectacles uttered with a smile that though meant as friendly appeared forced, Zelda could tell.

Her father had ensured that her tutors were educating her in the arts of diplomacy and conversation for her future role as monarch of her people. Those lessons told her this man was highly skilled in those arts too.

She sat in a semi-comfortable black padded, wireframe metal chair in front of a large desk which appeared to have a polished wooden top laid over a metal frame. Behind the desk sat the man whom she had been brought to see in a high backed tan leather chair which somewhat resembled a kind of small, comfortable throne, if, that is, a throne could be on rollers and recline somewhat. Next to her sat Doctor Jennifer, the woman who had been kind to her, and who still hauntingly reminded her of her own mother.

They were all seated in an enclosed office at the apex of the tallest tower, the central tower of the city itself. To the right of her, several giant bay windows opened up to an even more expansive chamber that was nearly as large as the great hall of Hyrule Castle itself. What glances she caught of that chamber through the windows were of stained glass and a great metal ring which brought up even more feelings and random images in her mind, though she had little idea where they came from.

After being permitted to leave the place Jennifer called their medical center the day before, Zelda had been allowed over the last day or so to stretch her legs and be taken to a private apartment within the city close to the medical center. She had always remained the watchful eye of either Doctor Jennifer or one of the doctor's companions, but they had not been unkind or impolite.

In the apartment was a glass and metal door that opened up onto a small balcony or terrace. She had gone through the door and out on the terrace to see the ocean view. The ocean had always been something that she loved, even though her home in Castle Town was so far from it. But as she breathed in the salty air on that terrace, and felt the bright warm tropical sunlight on her skin, looking out over the towers and expanse of the floating city powerful emotions started to seize her.

That was when tears began to roll down her cheeks with a will of their own as feelings and images without context and without reason came unbidden to her conscious mind. They were feelings of home, of longing desperately for this place that she thought she had never seen before, and of loss that she couldn't explain.

She had quickly tried to contain them and regain her composure at her inexplicable reaction. Within herself she tried desperately to make sense of it, but couldn't. It felt like she knew this alien city from deep within her subconscious, but she couldn't bring those memories to bear.

Now, this man, a Mister Woolsey, whom Doctor Jennifer told her governed this city wanted to speak with her in his office. The kind woman stayed with her as she was led up the tower to this office.

Mister Woolsey didn't appear to be a particularly tall man. He had more the build of a scholar or a politician than a warrior. He wore the same grey uniform Doctor Jennifer did, though his appeared to have red highlights while hers had green. His face told her he could be cunning and devious when it suited his agenda. She had seen and known men like him in her father's court. She liked none of them.

But the difference between this man and those others as she quickly studied him, is that, unlike those courtiers, she also sensed he would try to do what he thought was the right thing, and not just what suited his own ambitions. That was good. That was useful. She might be able to trust that.

He was also trying to be polite and friendly when, as governor, he was under no obligation to appear so. She noted that he was also awkward in his attempt. It wasn't his strongest quality. This was a man more comfortable negotiating with no pretenses to courtesy; who could always find a way to strike a favorable deal. This would also be useful to her she decided as she continued her appraisal.

"Yes, thank you." She responded politely and with appropriate grace. "Doctor Jennifer's care of my person has been exceptional."

He paused for a moment at the courteous and somewhat overly mature answer, and then responded as he sat back in his chair, "Yes, I'm sure it has."

His own eyes suddenly sharpened as she saw he began to reappraise her as well. His expression then began to drop some of it's artificial nicety and took on a more businesslike appearance.

"I'd like to know more about where you are from and how you came to us. To say the least it was very unusual." Mr. Woolsey then told her, coming directly to the point. His tone remained both polite and non aggressive, but it told her he had quickly realized she was not his inferior in any way.

She considered his question carefully, and then decided it would only be an obstacle to keep things from him at this point. She needed information as much as he did, possibly more than he did.

"The last thing I remember was traveling with my retinue on an official visit to the Goron village in Eldin Province. We were still within Hyrule field. My retinue consisted of twenty knights and five courtiers. The Gorons are friendly to us, and there haven't been any bokoblin incursions for a hundred years. There was no reason to suspect we would be attacked. I grew drowsy in my carriage. The next thing I remember is waking up in your medical center with Doctor Jennifer." Zelda reported to him.

"I see." Mr. Woolsey said, a trace of skepticism edging his voice, but absorbing the information nonetheless. "Do you know what planet you are from, what your people call their world?"

"Our land has been called Hyrule since the beginning of our history. I don't know what you mean by 'planet'."

"So, you've never been anywhere else but Hyrule then? No other 'lands'?" He asked.

"Just a few of our outer provinces as my royal duties have demanded, and the coastline near Mido Town where my father would bring me on holiday. My father has restricted my official visits to regions where we maintain jurisdiction until I fully come of age." She answered.

Again, Mister Woolsey appeared to absorb this information in a calculating manner, his face becoming otherwise dispassionate.

He started another line of questioning, "Er, Doctor Jennifer tells me you say you are a Princess."

"I am." She replied with a seriousness. "I am the daughter of Gaepora the eighth, King of Red Lions, Sovereign of Hyrule and its provinces, and guardian of the Eight Temples."

She did not mention her father's and her most important function, guarding the secret of the Triforce. That was information to which only the royal family and its most trusted, loyal servants were privy.

The balding man leaned back in his chair pensive, calculating. "I see," was all he said.

The skeptical look in his eyes grew, telling her he couldn't believe what she was telling him. But it was in competition with the reality of her presence, and he couldn't reconcile the two.

"May I ask you a question, Mr. Woolsey?" She asked him.

"Of course." He responded smiling warily.

"Do you find what I'm saying difficult to believe?" She had considered keeping her observation to herself.

_No,_ she decided. _I need more information, and I need to know how much he knows if anything._

"Quite frankly, yes." He responded. "If you had come to me yesterday, this would have been simply one more first contact with an alien world. Well, perhaps not 'simple', but still."

"Why is that?" Doctor Jennifer spoke up, she had been quiet this entire time.

Mister Woolsey rubbed his face in his hands before he answered. "This morning, I happened to have breakfast in the mess hall with Dr. Lee. He recently transferred from Stargate Command to the Atlantis base about a week ago. It turns out in his spare time he has a passion for video games, especially one called 'World of Warcraft.' This morning however he was regaling me with details of a game he started playing a few days ago which he obviously enjoyed. As it turns out there's an entire series of these games stretching back to the mid-nineteen-eighties. He had a magazine with a number of pictures from the game which he was looking through and was only too happy to share whether I expressed interest or not."

He then leaned forward to look directly at Zelda. "The resemblance is uncanny." He declared.

"What resemblance?" Doctor Jennifer asked in confusion next to her.

Zelda looked as intently at him as he did at her, studying his face. _He knows who I am. He's known since I walked through the door, and where I come from_.

"Zelda, does the name 'Link' mean anything to you?" Mister Woolsey asked out of the blue.

Zelda nearly lost her composure at the mention of the name.

"How do you know that name?" She then demanded. No one knew that name outside of the royal family.

"So you do know the name?" He asked again, pressing his advantage.

"That name is a carefully guarded secret of the Hylian royal family." She replied, feeling more exposed than not. She was not used to another having the upper hand in these kinds of tests. "No one knows it outside of my father and I. Where did you hear it?"

"Link?" Jennifer asked, her face even more confused. "Who's Link?"

"Not as carefully guarded in my world as in yours apparently." Mister Woolsey told her, but his tone of voice softened. "Would you mind explaining it to the good doctor, or should I?"

She told this story to no one, having only read it herself in books and papers that had belonged to her mother and were left sealed for her eyes only when she was able to read them. It had been revealed to her by her father, who charged her strictly to keep it to herself. How did this alien Ordonian man learn of it?

She chose to break her silence and relate only as much as she needed in order to discover how much this man knew. "This name is given to only one boy born in a generation or over several generations, and always born as a commoner in obscurity. I have yet to meet one of these boys." Zelda responded carefully. "I have only heard it in the old stories of the Legend."

"The Legend of Zelda." Mr. Woolsey said.

"It was my mother's legend, yes. And like her, I became its guardian as well." She confirmed.

"The pattern on your dress and the back of your hand, it's the Triforce isn't it?"

"What do you know of the Triforce?" She then demanded, her ten year old control beginning to collapse under the strain. He had then just caught her completely off of her guard, and she understood that he was not her equal in this kind of game, but he had been playing it for much, much longer than she.

"Not as much as Doctor Lee," he responded, rubbing his temples as though gaining a headache. "Perhaps we should call him up here." He said wearily. "I'm sure he'd be thrilled to meet you."

He then pressed a button on his desk and spoke into the air, "Have Doctor Lee report to my office immediately." A disembodied voice spoke back, "yes, sir."

They waited for a few minutes until a shorter, overweight man with a genial look on his face appeared in the doorway huffing and puffing as though he'd run and his body didn't know what to do with itself. He also wore spectacles and a long white coat over a similar uniform to Doctor Jennifer.

"Yes, Mr. Woolsey? You wanted to see me?" He said, he then noticed Zelda sitting in the chair. "Oh, hey great cosplay! You look just like Princess Zelda! You know I just started playing the game myself and I've really started getting into it, although I've never really been into console systems like the Nintendo before. You know..." Mr. Woolsey cut him off.

"Doctor Lee. I would like you to meet Princess Zelda of the Kingdom of Hyrule." He said, his voice tired with grave seriousness.

"Wait, what?" Doctor Lee said.

"She came through the gate yesterday morning unconscious and woke up in our medical center yesterday afternoon not being able to speak to us at all. She then touched the mark on her right hand and was able to speak fluent English, although with a lovely exotic accent." He added folding his hands in his lap. He smiled politely when he remarked on her accent.

"That's impossible." Doctor Lee said in disbelief. "This has to be a joke. This is Doctor Keller's little sister, right?" He gestured towards Jennifer. "Dressed up for a costume party?"

Zelda stood up from her chair as gracefully as she could, and with a masterful voice that no one would expect from a ten year old girl she declared in her lovely accent, "I am Princess Zelda of the Sovereign Kingdom of Hyrule, daughter of the King of Red Lions, possessor of the Triforce of Wisdom and keeper of the Legend of Zelda. And I assure you, I am just as in the dark about this as you are." She then looked to Mr. Woolsey for a further explanation.

Mr. Woolsey massaged his temples again, his head was obviously hurting as it tried to process through everything.

"That's impossible." Doctor Lee said again. "Well, I mean I suppose it's not totally impossible given multiverse theory, and, let's face it, we've seen some pretty strange things that have been far stranger than this..." He started to ramble on.

"Are you saying that Zelda, this girl in front of us, is a character from a video game?" Doctor Jennifer asked.

"Well... yes. I mean I don't know about this girl, but Zelda's the princess who's been kidnapped by the Demon King who has to be rescued by the hero Link. It differs from game to game, but the hero always has to rescue her, and defeat the Demon King to keep him imprisoned so he doesn't ever get all pieces of the Triforce. In some games he already has the Triforce of Power, in others he doesn't. But the Princess always carries the Triforce of Wisdom, and Link always carries the Triforce of Courage." Doctor Lee rattled on, clearly unnerved and excited at the same time.

Zelda listened to Doctor Lee's ramblings with deepening concern as the details of this "game" he described matched the legend which had been passed into her keeping point for point. It was impossible for this Ordonian to know any of this, but he did, and with precise details.

"Remind me again, it's been a long time since we've had a visit from someone from another reality. What does the multiverse theory say again?" Mr. Woolsey asked, appearing as though he ether couldn't believe they were having this conversation, or couldn't believe he was encouraging the excitable doctor to expound on anything.

"Well, it says, essentially, that if a reality can exist then it does exist somewhere because the number of realities is infinite. As we know from experience, there are other Doctor Lees, other Doctor Kellers, and other Richard Woolseys. We've actually met some of our duplicates over the years. But this..." he gestured to Zelda. "We've never encountered this kind of thing before." He then added under his breath, "wow."

Zelda took all this in with silence, trying to process what she had just heard. Mr. Woolsey then looked at her again, and she found Doctor Jennifer's eyes on her too. Doctor Lee was obviously deep in excited thought.

"It's begun again." She then said quietly, coming to the only conclusion she knew of which might explain it.

"What's begun?" Doctor Jennifer said.

"The legend has begun again. The cycle of the Hero, the Princess, and the Demon King is starting once more. The Demon King must have been unsealed somehow. But… but this is different. The Triforce, the whole Triforce, must remain within Hyrule or else our world will be thrown out of balance. Our world depends on it." She knew this was true, deep within herself. Something was very wrong. "I don't think this has ever happened before." She finished.

"No. I'm sure not." Mr. Woolsey said. "It's a first for us as well." He then paused for a moment and said, "who is this Demon King?"

She responded, "He is an ancient evil god, whom the gods of light fought against and sealed away. He broke free of his prison and threatened to engulf all of Hyrule again. The very first hero, Link, fought him back and resealed him in his prison. The seal isn't perfect though. He is a powerful dark force, and he uses his power to possess people who crave power. And so every few hundred years, enough time for it to pass out of living memory, the seal weakens and he rises again. When the good gods foresee this happening they cause the Hero, Link, to be born as a mortal once more, hidden away from the rest of the world, and when it is time, the Hero rises up to undo the Demon King's designs and seal him away again."

"Until the next time." Mr. Woolsey said.

"Until the next time." Zelda confirmed quietly.

"Wow, he almost sounds like an Ori." Doctor Lee interrupted.

Mr. Woolsey looked at him in surprise, and then, "yes. Yes he does indeed." Pensive again.

"I must return to Hyrule, Mr. Woolsey. If the cycle is starting again, the Triforce of Wisdom must be returned to restore the balance."

"I agree." Mr. Woolsey said without hesitation. "We need to get you home. But in order to do that we need, at the least, a Stargate address to dial to. Without that, we, and you, are stuck."

"Mr. Woolsey, my land will destroy itself in foolishness without the Triforce of Wisdom." She protested. She then added, "Long ago, a tragedy occurred. My ancestors were tricked into allowing the Demon King's host to gain possession of the Triforce of Power. The Demon King will not stop until he has possession of all the parts of the Triforce. If he can, he will come looking for me here. As long as I remain here with you, you and your world are in terrible danger. I must return."

"As I said, we need an address." Mr. Woolsey said, clearly in agreement with her.

"What does this address look like? I have seen many books and works which no one else in Hyrule has access to. Perhaps I do know it, and did not know what it was." She said thinking through everything her tutors had instructed her with, trying to remember all the images and illustrations from her mother's notes and books.

"An address is usually seven symbols in a line or sequence, representing star constellations," Doctor Lee said. "Six symbols to identify the destination and then one symbol for the point of origin. Of course, we've known a couple of eight symbol addresses, and one nine symbol address because of how far away it is; but usually with another reality it's been a seven symbol address with some kind of extra tweak thrown in."

"Seven symbols." She repeated. "Show me what they look like," she said, regal authority dripping from her voice.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3 - Meetings

Link traveled north along winding paths and trails through the woods with Impa for the better part of two days. He rode straddling Epona as he followed Impa on her sleek, midnight black mare down the paths and into the woods. They had begun on the royal highway which, he had been taught, ran from Ordon north all the way to Castle Town in the middle of the royal province referred to by most people as "Hyrule Field".

The first day of their journey following the highway took them across the great bridge which spanned a great chasm in the earth beneath them, and kept Ordon largely separate and somewhat independent from the rest of the kingdom. It was a kind of hanging rope bridge made with strong, magically reinforced cables and timbers.

Link had paused when the two travelers had come to the edge of the chasm, even as Impa continued ahead of him. It was the farthest from his village in Ordon that he had ever gone, and he instinctively knew that once he had passed out of his home province and into the Faron woods on the other side of the chasm there was no going back.

A kind of fear began to creep up within him as he looked across the chasm from Epona's back as the realization that he might not be returning began to overwhelm him. It was a choice that he had to make. No, it was a choice that he was being forced to make, and in that moment, he resented all those powers who were forcing him to make that choice.

_But this is what I was born to do._ The words came to his mind from somewhere inside himself.

Link steeled himself, and urged Epona onto the bridge to follow behind the Sage who had not halted her own steed but kept on moving across to the other side.

As Link rode, the light, coppery chain mail that Rusl insisted he wore under his forest colored tunic chafed the skin of his arms and neck where his cloth undergarments failed to protect his skin. On his head was a long tapered cap the same color as his tunic which he had retrieved along with a few other small items of either practical or sentimental value from his house before setting off. As impractical as the hat seemed some times, it was another piece of clothing which his mother had made for him, and he couldn't just leave it behind. Impa had approved when she saw it, saying it suited him.

A sword hung from his back in a well crafted Deku wood scabbard under a sturdy but light wooden shield with a thin hammered steel face. The very real steel blade Rusl had equipped him with was one of the finest the swordmaster could produce from his anvil and forge. The hilt was a masterfully crafted, intricately carved bronze and polished Deku wood. The blade itself was highly polished and razor sharp with a slightly golden hue to the metal which was inlaid with runes and knotted designs important to the Ordonian people.

"This weapon had been intended as a gift for the royal family from our village." Rusl had told him upon presenting the blade to the boy. "It is the finest sword I have ever crafted for anyone. I have many blades in my workshop which I could have given you, Link. The Mayor and I want you to know how much you mean to us. We don't care what race you are. You are from Ordon, and this will always be your home, and we your family. Never forget that, son. You have been my best student. I could not think of anyone better to wield it and bring our little village greater honor."

The boy had treasured the praise from Rusl, and received the sword with pride and a determination to live up to the Ordonian swordmaster's expectations. He swore within himself to not let the people who had raised him down. He accepted it reverently from the swordmaster, bowing slightly as he did so.

The memories which still struggled to integrate within him, however, pronounced it merely adequate for now, and told him there was only one blade which would suit him for the task which lie ahead of him. It was not a disdain which he felt, only the necessities of experience which told him how it must play out.

Some distance past the bridge, as the light of the sun began to fight its angry red battle for life which all knew it would surrender to the night, Impa drew her horse off the highway, expecting Link to follow, which he did. She moved through the brush and trees until they both came to a little clearing of grass and fallen trees within the woods. In the center of the clearing were the remains of blackened sticks, twigs, and larger pieces of wood which had clearly been used for a campfire.

"Go, find dry wood around the clearing, boy. The night will get cold." She ordered him, and he did as he was told.

Within a short span he had collected a large bundle of small dead branches and sticks to make a fire with from around the edges of the clearing. As he did, he could feel the eyes of many, many creatures on him, watching him. Whereas the boy within him became frightened, the memories of the Hero brought to mind exactly who and what were watching him, and the knowledge that, this close to the highway, they would likely stay far away from the campsite.

Returning to the center of the clearing, he began to instinctively arrange the wood into a tripod which would allow air to flow, placing dry grass and leaves underneath for tinder. He then took a flint which he had packed and began to unsheath his sword to use it with the flint to create a spark for the fire.

"Leave your sword, child. There's no need to mar the swordmaster's work with such a menial task." Impa then stopped him, raising her hand palm up.

Link then began to slide the sword slowly back into its sheath, still watching her and wondering how then she expected him to make a fire.

The old woman then held her open palm towards the arrangement of wood and blew at it gently across her palm. Immediately, the wood burst into flame.

_Magic_. The thought came unbidden. _Hylian magic._

Ordonians practiced very little magic as a rule, preferring to rely on what they could engineer, make, or forge themselves. As he had once been told by his mother, the magical arts didn't come as easily or naturally to the rounded eared people as it did to Hylians. Only his adoptive mother, Saria, out of all those in the village, had been the only person he had known to ever use it or to even appear to know how. Even then, with the exception of their house, she used it only sparingly. She too was Hylian.

Brief images of the experience of magic, both wondrous and terrifying, flashed through his mind from his other memories. Those Heroes he may have been in the past knew about magic only too well, and had even used it somewhat themselves, though none had ever fully understood or trusted it. In that, he took comfort in the idea of him always having had just a little Ordonian within him after all.

That night around the campfire was spent silently as the Sage appeared to fall asleep sitting up with her eyes open. Link himself was preoccupied with his own thoughts, chewing on a piece of jerked meat which Rusl's wife had packed for him until his eyes grew too heavy and he lay down next to the fire.

On both that day of travel and the following, neither Hero nor Sage had said much to the other except what was necessary, and the truth was, he was glad for it. The memories which had been awakened within him were hard to sort out, as though he no longer knew who he was. He was a hundred different people, and yet he was none of them, but still just the boy who lost his mother days before.

Having turned off the main highway to follow barely discernible trails through the woods, Impa led him deeper, far deeper into the forest of Faron Province. More flashes of memory surfaced as he followed her. The image of a poisonous violet fog ran through his mind at one point as they crossed a tree filled depression, but there was no context to the image, no way of knowing if it had been a recent lifetime or thousands of years ago.

The memories which returned to him didn't just settle in his mind, but deeper within his limbs and body as well as his legs and torso adjusted and took control of Epona as though he had been riding her for decades, and not the few months that the goat-herd had possessed her. The muscles of his arms and hands too knew how to hold, slash, block, and parry with a sword in ways that he was certain Rusl could only dream about, but he also knew that he himself had never swung anything else but the wooden practice swords the other boys used, and while he may have been more proficient in his lessons, Rusl had always still been his better before now.

Impa's horse followed a steep, winding, and at times broken path down into a canyon where Link could not see the bottom. Her horse took each step with a sure footing as though it had done this hundreds of times, and Link pressed Epona to follow, even though not sure of it himself. The memories within him urged him onwards, telling him it would be fine.

As they descended, he wondered what forces had formed and shaped the canyon. Were they natural? Were they magic? He was certain the answer must lay within those other memories, but they were silent on the subject.

Eventually, the path led into a cavern which turned into a kind of tunnel into a series of grottoes or gardens walled off from one another except by more passages through the rock. A faint but lively melody played on pan-pipes could be heard echoing off the walls of the grottoes, but the Sage ignored it, and continued on her path, expecting him to keep up.

They finally set eyes on the temple by sunset of the third day of travel, or rather on the ruins of a temple which might had been there millennia ago. At first, Link was confused, and then recognition from his other memory took hold. He knew this place well. His past lives had visited this place many times over the course of thousands of years. The landscape had changed. Buildings had crumbled. But there was no mistaking it for what it was. The ten year old boy never having been there, he nevertheless recognized the ruins for what they were.

They had crumbled even further since the last memory he had of seeing them, but he instinctively knew that didn't matter to the Temple of Time. The roof and walls had collapsed centuries before even then, and he could feel that "his" last visit had been centuries ago. But time itself was irrelevant to this edifice.

Only the doors stood as pristine as the day they were fashioned. The doors set in hinges in a door frame that seemed completely useless and out of place when the rest of the temple was open and exposed to the elements. This is all it would appear to be to the adventurous stranger who managed to make it this far alive.

Appearances could be deceptive where the Temples of Hyrule were concerned.

Impa had led her mount down a worn and broken flight of steps to let her horse graze in what had been the sanctuary of the temple that the doors opened up on to. She then motioned for Link to do the same with Epona, though he hesitated, knowing the dangers of this place.

"She will be fine, you have my word." Impa told him. "We do not believe you will need her further at present. She will be waiting here with us."

"We?" Link asked, though Impa gave no answer.

Impa and he then returned up the broken steps to stand in front of the seemingly useless doors.

Something didn't seem right, however. He looked at the doors more closely, and the space in front of them, and couldn't help but feel that something was missing. Then he knew what it was.

"There was a guardian here." He said, the image of an armored stone warrior positioned eternally on guard in front of the doors.

"Very good. You remember." She said. "There is a guardian when this temple needs one, but why would the temple need to guard itself from me?"

She stood facing the double doors, staring at them intently. She then pulled out a small harp and played six notes, and then three more. She did this twice. The melody was familiar to him, from a very long time ago, except for the last three notes. That didn't seem right. It seemed out of place. She replaced the harp into the folds of her red cloak and then waited. There wasn't long to wait.

The frame of the doorway glowed with a blue light as a series of strange symbols emerged and then vanished around it. The doors creaked and cracked and slowly swung open towards them. A blue haze, like a brilliant pool of water engulfed the door frame. Link had never seen anything like it. He couldn't see the other side, just the reflective pool of water. Link walked up to it and touched the surface of the water. It rippled gently beneath his touch.

Impa said nothing about it. She took one step, and then walked straight into the water, disappearing from sight. Link knew he was to follow. The memory of where he was, and of having done this before was strong. Of course, his memory of it wasn't a pleasant one. Then, he had come to collect a piece of a mirror and kill a demon. Somehow that prospect seemed less daunting. He didn't really know what await him now.

He walked forward into the water. Immediately stars exploded in front of him and he felt himself pulled across the vastness of space and time. Then, just as quickly as it began, it ended and he found himself stepping down onto a stone staircase leading into the center of a temple that looked newly built. Gold gleamed from alcoves and walls. It was beautiful beyond what he could ever know, and yet he knew that he had known it before, and it hadn't changed since then.

"Come, hero." Impa said to him, gesturing him down the stairs. "The others are waiting for us."

"The others?" Link asked.

"What has happened has disturbed the whole of Hyrule, past and present. I am not the only Sage who has noticed. We are meeting here, where we can all discuss what has happened, and best advise you on what to do about it." She said as they walked forward towards another set of doors leading further into the temple.

"What _I_ am to do about it?" He asked, thinking he misunderstood what she said.

"Yes, Hero. We must stay and guard the temples. You and you alone can resolve this. This is the fate of the chosen Hero of the goddesses." She answered him. Her voice was quiet, but in the silence of the temple, it rebounded off the walls and slammed into him with a thud.

She led him into the inner sanctum. It was a smaller room ringed in gold and marble. At the center of it stood a pedestal with a magnificent sword buried to the hilt within its center. Around the pedestal was a gathering of people from every corner of Hyrule.

"Welcome Hero of Hyrule." One among them said to the agreement of the rest.

Link bowed instinctively.

"You are younger now than we had hoped." Another said, this was a "Kokiri" he remembered, one of the mysterious forest people that made their villages deep within the part of Faron Province known as the "Lost Woods."

"I thought there were only eight Sages," Link said, "for the eight temples."

"There are only ever eight Sages at any one point in time, young hero, but time means nothing here in this place, and we need the wisdom of all the ages of Hyrule right now." A Zora woman, one of the gray skinned water dwelling peoples of Lanayru province, spoke up.

"Why? What has happened that is so different?" He asked again, this time to every Sage which had ever lived.

The Legend was always more or less the same. The time and circumstances varied, but it always happened more or less the same. He knew this from both his storybook and from the flashes of memory that came to his mind.

"Tell him," this was an older Hylian man.

Impa spoke up. "The Princess is gone from our world, and with her the Triforce of Wisdom."

"Gone? Where has she gone?" Link questioned.

"We don't know." Impa responded.

"You don't know? You're the great sages of Hyrule from all the ages. You can't find her?" He said, raising his voice. He remembered lifetime after lifetime fighting to save Princess Zelda again and again, and they lost her completely?

"She is nowhere to be found in any time period of Hyrule. She is not in our world." A Goron man with a rocky beard, one of the large, stone based people from Eldin Province, said.

"What about Termina? Or the Twilight realm?" Link asked.

"We searched those places as well. They are still strongly connected to Hyrule's own reality, and subject to her gods. The Princess is nowhere that we can search." Impa said.

"Believe me, hero," a dragon then addressed him, "we've looked intently through all the worlds and times we can reach. She is nowhere among them."

"This has happened only once before." Another Sage spoke up, "many hundreds of years ago. The consequences were profound and dangerous for both our world, and the world to which she was kidnapped. Their timeline and natural course of development were irretrievably altered as we came to learn. This must not happen again."

"You must find her and bring her back, Hero. You must recover the Triforce and the Princess who carries it." Impa told him.

"You remember who she is, do you not, young Hero?" Another woman, younger than Impa yet so much the same stepped forward.

Link thought back. It was an old memory, one of the oldest, from a time when the great city in the sky, Skyloft, was still inhabited. It was from the beginning of Hyrule itself. Yes, he remembered. Just as he was reborn so was she, no less important than the first time she took Hylian form.

"Hylia." He whispered. "The Lady Hylia. I remember."

"Yes, Hero. Hylia herself. If she and the Triforce of Wisdom are not returned to Hyrule our world will be thrown out of balance and into a chaos which we may not be able to undo. Hyrule will destroy itself without Hylia to sustain it."

"What do I do? Where do I start?" Link asked.

The sages murmured among themselves. He could hear their low voices discussing what to say and what not to. Finally the younger woman like Impa answered him, "There are worlds older than Hyrule that we are aware of. Thousands of years ago, before even my time, the first Hylians came to this world from another. I believe it is most prudent to begin there, in that world of our origins."

"How do I do that?" Link asked.

Impa touched the pedestal where the sword was embedded. A great ring rose in front of him until it was completely vertical, like a gateway. Strange symbols etched in blue covered its face. Suddenly, the symbols began to glow brightly as the ring began to spin one way and then the other, back and forth until ten of the symbols on the ring were lit. When this happened, a great, inverted vortex of what looked like water rushed out from the open center of the ring, and then just as quickly, collapsed back into it leaving only a shimmering "puddle" of what appeared to be bright, illuminated water.

"I warn you, hero, once you pass through this portal, we can help you no longer. You will be beyond our protection or even our knowledge. We don't know what will happen, and we don't know how you may return. Once you have Princess Zelda, you must secure a way back to us on your own." Impa warned him gravely.

"I understand." Link said.

"Before you go, you may have need of a Sacred treasure which I'm sure you'll recognize." The Goron told him.

He looked at the sword in the pedestal. He moved towards it, but was blocked by the younger "Impa". "Not now, boy," she said forcefully. "The Master Sword still keeps the Demon King imprisoned. If you take it now, with the Triforce and Hylia gone, Hyrule's destruction is assured. You must retrieve her without it."

Link withdrew his hand and nodded. It seemed strange to go on without the Master Sword, it was out of place. But nothing about this felt _normal_.

"No, but you will need this," Impa held out what looked like an amethyst magnifying glass set with a pinkish lens.

"This lens will reveal things for what they really are, and will allow you to read books which you couldn't otherwise. It may be more valuable to you than the Master Sword in your search." The old woman said.

Link nodded, then turned to the gateway that had opened up in front of him.

"Where does this portal lead?" Link asked.

"To a place where the first ancestors came from, that is all we know." The Goron said. "No one has stepped back through to this place for ten thousand years."

Once again Link found himself facing a brilliantly lit pool of water. He took Epona's reins tightly in his hand and plunged into it yet again. Every other time before, he knew, he had a good idea of what to expect when his time came. This time... he didn't even know if he could come back.

Zelda had been studying several sets of symbols for hours without rest in an empty office. They had allowed her to sit down at a wooden and copper desk in another wire frame and black padded chair, and given her a kind of highly polished tablet like one might use to write one. Except this tablet lit up with images and words.

At present, its face was covered in the oddly shaped runes which covered the face of the circular ring she had viewed through the bay windows in Mister Woolsey's office. The thirty nine symbols were arranged in rows and columns so that she could see them clearly. They were stylistically different from the previous thirty six symbols that she had studied in that the first set were a series of dots interconnected with thin lines. These looked like they could have been brush strokes with a pen or brush.

But try as she might to make any comparison with the symbols she was given with any design or written language she had been shown or taught, she just couldn't. They _did_ look vaguely familiar, both sets, but she couldn't remember where she had seen them before. Like with the sense of deja vu she kept getting at every corner she turned in this city, she felt she knew them somehow, but the details of that knowledge remained frustratingly out of reach.

Doctor Lee, who turned out to be a gentle and kind man if somewhat awkward, had been instructed by Mister Woolsey to assist her because of his strangely acquired knowledge of her world. He too went over the symbols and compared them with images on a second tablet that he studiously avoided showing her. When she had inquired about seeing what was on his tablet's face, he apologetically replied that it might cause more problems between their two worlds if he did.

The daylight had long ago faded from the office's glass windows when she set the tablet down on the desk one last time, rubbing her eyes to keep the lids from closing on their own. She then felt a slender woman's hand on the shoulder of her dress and looked up to see that hauntingly familiar face of Doctor Jennifer once more.

"Hey, you've been at this non-stop for hours." She told the Princess. "It's not going to do anyone any good if you pass out here from exhaustion. You need to take a break, and try again tomorrow."

Seeing the wisdom in her words, Zelda nodded at her wordlessly, then excused herself politely from Doctor Lee's company and went with the healer.

The doctor led her back to the small, sparsely furnished apartment across the city she had slept in the night before. Some plain white night clothes to change into were already lain out on the bed. Jennifer stayed with the ten year old princess until she was out of her ornate, medieval style, pink and silver dress, dressed in the night clothes, and then under the covers in the bed. Zelda fell asleep within seconds as the doctor watched over her.

"Dr. Keller, please report to the briefing room." Mr. Woolsey's voice came through her earpiece as she stood watch over the unusual girl.

"I'm on my way," she touched her earpiece, responding quietly.

She slipped out of the small studio apartment and past the two soldiers in uniform set to guard the door for the night. It still seemed to her to be overkill for a ten year old, but then as she thought about it, her colleagues had seen far more innocent looking yet incredibly dangerous things in their sojourn within the ancient city.

When she arrived, Mr. Woolsey and Dr. Lee were sitting waiting for her, along with two other men. Rodney McKay, the chief scientist on Atlantis, was a mildly overweight man in his thirties with sandy blond hair and blue eyes. He tended to be a bit on the neurotic side, and Jennifer believed him to have borderline Asperger's Syndrome, but he was a brilliant physicist and mathematician and had been responsible for more than half of all the new research and discoveries in the city. Jennifer had also been in a relationship with him now for a few years. Colonel John Shepherd, the military commander, appeared to be in his early forties with blackish brown hair, somewhat elfish ears, and usually an impish grin.

It was getting later at night, and there was fresh coffee in a decanter set out with ceramic mugs on the wooden half circle or horse shoe shaped copper and synthetics table. The architecture of the room itself followed the same, cathedral like architecture of the chamber which held the stargate. It was dominated by green and copper paneling with the same red marble flooring. Computer monitors hung in a couple of places around the terminal points of the half circle on opposite sides of bay windows that looked out over other parts of the city. It looked comfortable, yet also both academic and professional. Like it had been designed by a race of scholars and scientists.

"Dr. Keller, have a seat please, there's fresh coffee if you'd like some." Mister Woolsey gestured to the decanter. "Dr. Lee and I have just been entertaining Dr. McKay and Colonel Shepherd by bringing them up to speed on our little Princess."

The disbelieving and skeptical looks on the faces of the other two men bore out the truth of his words.

"So, Dr. Keller, what do you think of our... royal charge?" Mr. Woolsey asked.

"She's friendly enough, but she's like no ten year old I've ever seen." Jennifer replied. "She's hardworking, serious, devoted to her duty, and far more mature than most adults I've ever met."

Mr. Woolsey nodded in agreement with her observations.

"Alright, now that we're all here, we need to decide what is the best course of action regarding Princess Zelda and her dilemma." Mr. Woolsey said. "Any thoughts?"

"I used to play this game when I was a kid way back in the eighties," Colonel Shepherd commented, "I never thought I'd be doing it for real."

"I'm with you there," Dr. Lee said, "I mean the implications are mind-boggling."

"Why can't we just send her off-world to one of our allies for the time being? That way if this Demon King comes looking for her, he won't find her here and pass us by." Dr. McKay offered.

"But then we'll just be putting our allies in danger, Rodney," Colonel Shepherd said, "and if I'm not mistaken, it won't reduce us as a target, will it? He'll just get ticked she's not here."

"Uh, that's not really an option, is it?" Dr. Keller asked. "I mean, all things considered she is still just a little girl that needs to get back home, right?"

"In all likelihood, really," Dr. Lee said, answering Colonel Shepherd's question. "I've spent a large part of today going through all the game guides and walkthroughs for the Legend of Zelda games. The demon king isn't the understanding type, I mean... No, if he comes here he's going to do a lot of damage no matter what."

"Alright, next option." Mr. Woolsey said.

Jennifer's expression became increasingly uncomfortable in the way the men at the table were discussing Zelda's near future.

"We help her get back to her own world to let this 'cycle' continue like it's supposed to." Colonel Shepherd stated, glancing at Jennifer.

"Except it's already gone beyond her reality, and spilled over into ours and who knows how many others." Rodney countered.

"What do you mean? Explain." Asked Mr. Woolsey.

"I mean look, she's here. Why is she here? If this demon king, Ori, rogue ascended being whatever you want to call him is responsible for this, then why is she here? Why put her in our hands where we're going to do everything within reason to protect her? Why not just have his way with her wherever he's at?" The chief scientist stated.

It was a good question.

"Are you saying this demon king isn't responsible for her being here?" Dr. Keller asked.

"Maybe not directly at least. But from what I can see, whoever sent her here did it to protect her and whatever power she's carrying. Someone else from outside our reality made this our business for some reason, and now we've been dragged into this, this... video game," he spat the words, "against our will."

"Why would they do that? If they knew it could harm their world for her, what did you call it a 'Triforce'? Yes, for her Triforce to be removed from their world, why risk it?" Mr. Woolsey asked.

"Maybe it has something to do with who she really is, or I mean, who she's supposed to be." Dr. Lee said.

All eyes around the table turned to Dr. Lee with questioning looks.

"Who she really is?" Colonel Shepherd asked.

"What do you mean?" Mr. Woolsey added.

"Well, in one of the more recent games it was revealed that Zelda was actually the reincarnation of the good goddess Hylia. In that game she had to go through several trials to recover her ancient memories. She's bound to Hylian form and tied to the world of Hyrule itself." Dr. Lee explained.

"So whoever sent her here felt like she couldn't be protected there anymore and sent her to us?" Colonel Shepherd reasoned.

"Yeah, I mean, it would explain a lot of things." Dr. Lee said.

"I don't get it, though. Why interrupt the cycle now? How could we defend her any better than her 'hero'?" Colonel Shepherd asked. "It seems like everything's worked up till now."

"Good question." Mr. Woolsey said.

Rodney became silent and thoughtful. Jennifer had no answer to the question asked either.

Dr. Lee then said, "well, if Zelda's ten years old, then Link would be ten years old as well right now. They're always the same age, but I don't know why that would make a difference now. In the games, he's either ten or seventeen when it all happens. Maybe he does have to do it, but needs some help this time."

"But how could we help him?" Mr. Woolsey asked.

Rodney's expression then lit up and he snapped his fingers several times.

"We're talking about a powerful ascended being right?" He asked.

"Well, yes, we think so, I mean that's kind of how he's described in the games." Dr. Lee answered.

"Then we may actually be able to put an end to this demon king once and for all. Let the good guys win for good, so to speak." Dr. McKay told him, a tinge of excitement creeping into his voice.

"How?" Mr. Woolsey asked.

"Well, as you know, we've been on pretty good terms lately with the former priors of the Ori and they've helped us to retrieve Adria's flagship from their galaxy." Rodney started.

"And?" Colonel Shepherd asked.

"And... we were finally able to download the entire database from it and load it into Atlantis' computers." Rodney continued.

"And?" Colonel Shepherd asked again, impatiently.

"And... Along with that database came the plans for the Sangraal device. We didn't have the ability to recreate it before, but with Atlantis' computer system and laboratories, we could conceivably build another one." Rodney said with the beginning of a smile.

"Don't we need an ancient's help for that?" Mr. Woolsey asked. The last time it was used was a sore memory for him.

"Um... Excuse me, what's a Sangraal device?" Jennifer asked.

"It's a weapon designed by Merlin to interrupt the specific frequencies of ascended beings. It's a bomb capable of killing ascended beings." Rodney said, pleased with himself.

"Merlin?" Jennifer asked, even more confused.

"Yeah, he was an ancient around the time Atlantis was evacuated and ascended for a few millennia before he decided to take human form again in the tenth century." Rodney rattled off as though it was unimportant.

"Oh." The doctor replied.

"But wait a second," Dr. Lee began, "not all the gods and spirits of Hyrule are bad according to the games. If we detonate it there, it might have the same effect as keeping Zelda here."

"Could we limit its effects? Make it focus on a single target?" Mr. Woolsey asked.

"Well," Rodney stopped and thought, "we're talking about canceling one set of frequencies with another. It should be possible to point those canceling frequencies in a specific direction."

"Alright, Rodney, work on it." Mr. Woolsey said.

"We would need the Master Sword." Dr. Lee said.

"What is that?" Mr. Woolsey asked.

"Well, it's a magic sword that's found in all the games just like Link and Zelda are. Usually, Link is able to get it about halfway through. In the games it keeps the seal intact on the demon king's prison, and it's the only weapon that can actually harm him. If everything else from the games is real, then we may need to somehow integrate the Sangraal into its blade." Dr. Lee said.

"Alright, we'll take that into consideration." Mr. Woolsey said. "Meeting adjourned."

As the others left the conference room, Mr. Woolsey rubbed his temples again and wished for the simpler days of being a corporate lawyer. Things seemed so much less complicated then.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4 – New Worlds

Link materialized in shadowed darkness. It took a few minutes for his eyes to adjust to the extremely dim, somewhat orangish light barely glowing in the distance from where he stood.

The lighting in the temple he had just come from, while not excessively bright, was like broad daylight in comparison to the place where he now found himself.

When the pupils of his forest green eyes dilated as wide as they could to let in the meager light, he was able to make out shapes around him and then he was able to see more or less clearly. His night eyesight had always been keener than his surrogate Ordonian family's were due to his Hylian heritage. His native people's senses were, on the whole, keener than the southern, round eared folk.

He found himself standing in a chamber lined with sturdy, thick, obsidian black columns along the walls and at intervals throughout. In the dim lighting, he could not yet see the far wall, and could only barely see the ceiling above him where the columns terminated at. The polished marble white walls beyond the columns were lined with more aged books from floor to ceiling set neatly into stone shelves.

_It's a library._ A voice from the past within him told him. _A real library_. His ten year old self had little experience with such places, never having strayed far from the village of his childhood, though his mother had spoken of the libraries of Castle Town and beyond.

Under his feet, several inches of dust covered what had once been a highly polished obsidian stone floor. Placed in various locations around the room were benches, desks, and chairs which seemed to all be made of the same deep black stone the columns were. The lighting for the library hall came from strange lamps which barely gave off enough light to read by.

He turned to look behind him, instinctively expecting another great metal ring like the one he had stepped into, but there was nothing that he would have expected. There was no doorway like with the entry to the of Time, and no ring like the one which had brought him here. Strangely, it looked like he had just materialized out of the stale, dry, cool air.

Behind him instead was a large, worn, red leatherbound book laying open on a pedestal. The book's yellowed vellum pages were clean even as the black stone pedestal and what he could see of the cover were caked with layers of dust. It appeared for all the world as though the book had only just been opened minutes before.

As Link took in his surroundings, he bent down to study the thick dust on the floor. It hadn't been disturbed for a long, long time. He then stood up to look at the book on the pedestal. He was fortunate the pedestal wasn't taller than he was, but he was forcefully reminded of his youth again as he realized a full grown man would be looking down on the book, while it lay just beneath his eye level.

The book itself seemed whole and intact. He carefully picked up the front cover and closed it, blowing the layers of remaining dust off the otherwise plain red leather cover to see the title. The script however was illegible, at least to him, though he couldn't help but have a sense of familiarity with it, like he _should_ know it. It consisted of what looked to him like random squiggles and lines, and not the orderly Hylian script his mother had taught him to read.

Remembering the Sage's words, Link pulled the amethyst lens from the pouch he carried on his belt and, placing the crystal over the text of the alien book's title, looked at the writing again. The lines and squiggles reshaped themselves into real words he could read.

It said _The Book of Hyrule_.

He opened the book again and began examining its pages through the decrypting lens. Because of the apparent age of the pages, he fingered the vellum lightly, only touching the very edges of each page as he turned them. With his other hand, he held the lens over the text of the page and let it do its translating work.

The writing was not what he had been expecting. Rather than telling a story about Hyrule, it was _describing_ Hyrule, the world of Hyrule, itself; what it was like, how it would work, how much water, what the rules were that governed it. It was the strangest book he had ever seen. Carefully turning to the end, on the back page was what looked like a little glass inset window the size of an adult's hand. But what was truly wondrous about the window was the image contained within. All of world of his birth appeared to fly by within the window as though he himself might be flying over it. The image crossed forests and deserts, the grasslands of Hyrule field, and great lakes before then swinging back towards the Temple of Time, and then the room where the sages waited for him. He could see the faces and forms of those Sage through the window, and then wondered if they could see him as well.

Something within him, a feeling that reached deep beyond even his other memories told him the book was somehow his key to returning, and he was thankful that it was just right here waiting for him. Though he wasn't ready to try and figure out how to use it yet. He still had a princess to rescue and return home.

He closed the book and then, taking it from the pedestal, he slid it carefully into a large pouch hanging from his belt. He didn't think anyone would mind because, judging from the layers of dust it didn't look like anyone had been in the library, or even knew it existed for a long, long time.

He then went over to the books on the shelves to investigate those. They were filled with more books like it, as well as others that seemed to be notebooks on different worlds, as well as something called "The Art." He spent about an hour perusing the shelves of books trying to decide what might be useful and what might not be. The normal ten year old boy within him questioned why these dusty old books would be of any value, but the hero which had been awakened within him knew all too well the value of the information which the right book could give. He collected two of the smaller notebooks on The Art into his pouch as well. From what the lens showed him of their contents, he thought they might help him understand how to use the book which bore his homeland's name.

He then turned to his next problem, how to get out of this room and continue his search for Princess Zelda. It seemed to be shaped like a rectangle, but was so long the far end of it remained in darkness. Returning to the center pathway of the room where the red leather book's pedestal was, he began to walk towards the far end of the chamber he couldn't see.

It truly seemed endless, the shelves of books looked like they wanted to go on forever. Every so often he would pass another pedestal with a book lying closed. He investigated the first few and found they were "describing books" just like the one which rested heavily in his pouch, although he didn't recognize the names of the worlds they described. Places with names like _Azeroth_ and _Middle-Earth_. This last one had been laying open like the _Book of Hyrule_ had been, its back panel clean and exposed. He checked the floor around him and could find no footprints in the dust there except his own.

He considered it briefly, wondering what the implications of the open book might mean, but then moved on, leaving each of those other books where they lay. He continued on until at long last he came to a large set of obsidian, stone double doors.

_Why is everything here made from stone?_ He found himself asking. _It's like the builders of this place didn't know what wood was, or maybe they didn't have any to build with?_

He pushed hard on the doors. Much to his surprise, they gave way easily, scraping stone on stone, but not loudly. When the doors opened wide enough, he was able to make out a narrow set of steps just beyond them ascending upwards. They appeared gray to his eyes, and like much of the library itself looked to be covered in undisturbed dust. He focused his eyes on them further until he could tell that the stairs did not run straight, but appeared to curve off to the left as a spiral staircase shortly after the landing.

With no other direction to head, he proceeded to climb the stairs. The small, strange, dim orange lights were set into the walls of the stairwell at intervals of every ten steps or so allowing him to see his pathway, though as he pointed his eyes upwards through a narrow, circular opening, there was no brighter light that he could see above him.

The spiral stairs felt as though they went on forever as he climbed.

_How deep underground was this library?_ He wondered, and then he wondered, _Why would anyone build a library that far underground?_

It was a question that his ten year old mind couldn't conceive of an answer for. The dust which covered everything suggested that no one had used it in living memory, but why burrow a library underground in the first place and then just forget about it?

The muscles of his legs began to ache after what felt like an eternity as he continued to climb, and he was not an out of shape boy to begin with. The ladders which his treehouse demanded for navigation saw to that. It felt as though there would be no end to the stairwell.

His legs rubbery and weak, he finally emerged through another set of stone doors into a ruined structure, constructed of solid granite blocks. If it had a ceiling and a roof at one time, it had long since rotted away as he viewed the scene. The lighting seemed to be just a little better in the open air building, though it was still dim and carried an orangish hue.

Looking above him, it appeared to be night, but overcast in whatever world he was in as he turned his eyes upwards into the black sky overhead but saw no stars or moon. The air around him still did not smell fresh, even though it was cool, and there was no breeze to speak of. Instead, it had the earthy scent of being in a cavern underground, something his other memories told him his past lives had much experience with.

A man raised his startled voice in unintelligible words off to his left.

Link's face snapped in the direction of the voice to see a lone figure, a light skinned, clean shaven Ordonian man with sandy blond hair and spectacles over light blue eyes. He had the build of a man who had been trained to fight, but the bearing of a scholar and wore a long white coat open over an untucked blue buttoned shirt and trousers.

The Ordonian man watched him for several seconds before he shouted something else in the same, unintelligible tongue, though the shout was directed out into the air as though to other people nearby, and not to Link himself.

The man held his hands up level with he chest, palms outward in a gesture of being unarmed and no threat to the boy.

Link then tried talking to him by asking the first question that came to his mind, "Where am I?"

It seemed the sensible thing to start with, anyway.

About thirty seconds later several more Ordonians dressed in strange, form fitting black clothes came rushing in and pointed what looked like weapons at him.

Link responded by pulling his shield and sword from his back.

The shield was a good Hylian shield which Rusl had given him. It had been issued to the swordmaster years before in the Royal army, but had hung disused on his wall as an ornament since then. Like most shields in use by Hyrule's army, it had been enchanted by royal magicians with special magics to resist any attack, magic or otherwise, the boy had been told. He was fortunate the shield was large enough to protect most of his body, but light enough for his child's frame to wield with one hand.

"I'm not here for trouble." Link said. "I'm looking for Princess Zelda." He then added, "do you know where she is?"

The man in the white coat looked hard at him and stepped back when he heard the name "Zelda." Link could see the flash of recognition in his eyes as the man collapsed backward into the chair he had been sitting in prior to Link's arrival. He seemed to be muttering something to himself out loud.

One of the men in black then called out something to Link which he didn't understand. His lack of understanding must have been apparent because the man then pointed at him and then motioned downward with his weapon.

_He wants me to put my sword and shield down_, Link thought, _not likely_.

The same man in black, a soldier, Link guessed, then called out to the man in white. The man in white then responded with something else. Link watched their faces closely. They were having a discussion about something, probably him as the man gestured to the archway Link had emerged from. He then said something else and Link could clearly make out the name "Zelda" as it passed back and forth between the two men several times.

The soldier then called out to his men, and they slowly lowered their weapons, motioning for Link to do the same. He was outnumbered, though that had never slowed his past lives down. But, the boy didn't yet know what those strange weapons could do, and he didn't necessarily want to have to find out right at that moment either.

_They don't want a confrontation any more than I do_, Link understood. _And the man in white recognized Zelda's name. It's not much, but it's a start._

Link slowly re-sheathed his sword, although he kept his shield raised. The soldier in charge seemed satisfied with that and they lowered their weapons completely.

_Now what do I do?_ Link wondered. _I can't communicate with them, but at least they won't try to kill me_.

The man in white seemed somewhat recovered and sensed the impasse which had now formed. He then took out sheet of paper and drew something on it and held it up to show it to Link. He then tapped the picture and pointed at him, and then surprised the boy utterly when he said, "Link?"

Link looked at the picture, it was an imperfect replica of his birthmark. The mark of the Triforce.

In response, Link carefully pulled the glove off of his left hand and held it up so that the man could see the back of it. The face of the man in white held an expression of near disbelief. He heard his name and Zelda's several times as the man talked furiously with the first soldier whose face also took on an unbelieving look. He then heard another word passed back and forth several times so that it sounded like a name, "Atlantis." He didn't know who or what "Atlantis" was, but it was important somehow.

The Hylian boy then remembered the books below, and had an idea of how he could communicate with these people.

He motioned with his free hand for the piece of paper and the writing stick that the man in white had used. Deciding he would have to trust that they wouldn't try to harm him in the next few minutes, Link returned his shield to its resting place over the sword's scabbard on his back.

Kneeling down on the stone floor, he then wrote a single sentence in his native tongue and script, "Do you know where Zelda is?"

He then slowly pulled the Lens from his pouch and motioned for the man in white to approach him and look through it. He did and then nodded in surprise.

Encouraged by this first success, Link took the paper again and wrote, "Can you lead me to her?"

The man read it and nodded again. He then wrote some words on the paper and Link looked through the Lens. It read, "Are you Link?"

Surprised, the boy replied, "Yes."

The man then asked on the paper, "Where did you come from?"

Link responded in Hylian, "Hyrule. I don't know where I am. I must find and bring Zelda home."

The man nodded and then said something at length to the soldiers. Link heard the word "Atlantis" being said several times, as well as "Zelda".

He then wrote on the paper, "We know where Zelda is. She came to our world several days ago. She's in a city far from here, but we can get you there soon. She mentioned your name several times, but we didn't know where or if you would come. We didn't expect you to show up in this city."

Link nodded, and then stumbled a bit. It had been a long climb up the spiral stairs, and the adrenaline of the encounter with the man in the white coat and what looked to be his guards was wearing off quickly.

The man gave him a sympathetic expression and a half smile. He wrote on the paper again and then motioned with his hand to his mouth, "Are you hungry?"

Link nodded again. The truth was that the last few days, from the time he left his village until the present moment had worn him out completely.

"Come with me. We have food. You can trust me. My name is Daniel." The man wrote.

Link looked into his eyes and saw that he could be trusted. In a way the man's eyes reminded him of Saria's. They were kind and compassionate. He felt again like a ten year old boy in over his head, exhausted and needing some comfort.

"Okay." He wrote on the paper.

The man then led him from the ruins. The soldiers followed, their weapons at ease, but never out of their hands.

Zelda woke the next morning to a glorious sunrise in the east rising over the broad ocean. From the eastward facing windows of her apartment the golden sunlight streamed in bathing her in soft twilight which slowly brightened into full day, rousing her gently from sleep.

She sat up from her bed in her nightclothes and, sliding to the floor on her bare feet, she padded softly towards the glass inset door which led out onto the apartment's small balcony. Here, a metal frame table with two matching chairs had been placed up against the solid railing of the balcony, though she chose to use neither of them, instead preferring to stand and view the scene in front of her.

Like much in this city, the view felt familiar, though she couldn't imagine how it might be. Her homeland had no great, sprawling cities like this one, and certainly none which rested on the surface of the sea as easily as a fishing boat might float on Lake Hylia.

The scene in front of her was of a great stretch of metal and glass towers and smaller buildings reaching out away from the central tower of the city which, off to her left rose like a great obelisk or spire high into the sky, higher than any other man made structure she had ever seen. She could see that the tower which housed her apartment was solidly built on what looked to be a great pier, one of several which radiated out from the center like spokes on a wheel, or the points of a star. Beyond these piers was a vast, and seemingly endless ocean. White and gray feathered seagulls flew over the city and occasionally darted towards the water only to emerge with small fish as their reward.

In a brief flash, she saw within her mind's eye the same city filled with people, on another endless ocean. It felt as though a memory, long buried, and almost as soon as it came to mind, it was gone again.

A tear formed in the corner of her eye again, as she tried to retain it without success. The memory seemed important to her, and yet she couldn't understand why.

The ocean was not new to her as the scent of salt filled her nostrils. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. She loved the sea, as infrequently as she was able to visit Hyrule's own coastlines. The Hyrule she knew from day to day was land-locked.

The endless ocean in front of her made her feel small and insignificant next to the power of the waves which she could see and hear crashing against the docks and lower parts of the city. The seagulls flew and played in between the towers of the city, squawking and talking to one another. She wondered what they were saying as she stood at the window. And then she asked a question to herself which almost seemed silly.

"Is there no land on this world?" She wondered.

She moved back from the balcony into the apartment, and to a dresser where her dress, pink and silver and overlaid with the royal crest of the Hylian monarchy, lay. She wanted to put her dress back on, but it seemed out of place here, and a bit dirty from having to wear it for several days.

_My night clothes __a__re modest enough_, she thought, _but it won't do for a Princess of Hyrule to go wandering about in her nightclothes._

As she was debating this she saw another set of clothes, neatly folded on a chair next to the door. She picked them up and examined them. It was a plain white, pullover short sleeve shirt, and some kind of blue trousers that reminded her of something some miners she had once met wore because of their sturdiness. A pair of short stockings and hard soled white shoes with sturdy leather and cloth uppers sat on the floor. Underneath the blue trousers was some kind of woven pink cloth with two large holes she guessed was an undergarment meant for her waist and buttocks.

_Someone __left these for me__ last night after __I__ fell asleep._ She realized. _They're very common, but practical._

She looked again at her dress over on the dresser, and then decided that these clothes would be better suited for her task at hand. They looked lighter and more comfortable in the tropical temperatures of this world than her royal dress, and would allow her to blend in a little more easily. Although, she thought as she felt the tips of her ears, it still wouldn't be so easy.

She changed from her nightclothes into the Earth clothes which had been left for her. They were slightly big on her, but fit well enough. The low collar of the shirt caught on her ears and she had to carefully tuck them through with her fingers. The shoes were a little loose in comparison with her boots, but serviceable and cooler in this climate.

In the last few days she had seen no children in the parts of Atlantis which she had been allowed to see, and she wondered that someone was able to find clothing that could fit her. She was taller than most children her age and race, even in Hyrule, but also quite thin in comparison to these Ordonian peoples. She had not yet reached womanhood yet, that was still a few years away.

After dressing, she went back to stand at her balcony door and take in the morning air and think.

She had spent all night going over the symbols that were given to her. Three sets of symbols they told her belonged to three different systems of stargates, one they called a "Milky Way" stargate set, another they called a "Pegasus" stargate set, and a third they designated a "Destiny" stargate set.

She looked them over carefully for hours walking them back through her mind to all of the ancient runes she had even seen before. None of them looked familiar, no matter how hard she tried to make them fit in her mind. She could see that, at least with the first two sets, they were pictures of star constellations, but even then she didn't recognize the constellations. Although in a few from either she could imagine one or two of Hyrule's star shapes which she had seen during clear skies at night. She had tried to take these and work it through to six symbols but couldn't. In the end, she was no farther than when she started.

She missed her father and all the people of her household. There was a cook who would let her sneak strawberry pastries when no one else was looking, although her governess would be horrified if she knew.

Her governess, she had been in the carriage with her when she had blacked out and woken up in this place. Was she okay? Were the brave men in her retinue okay? She didn't know, and she worried for them. They would each, even her poor governess, lay down their lives for her, and that knowledge filled her with guilt. They were champions hand-picked by her father, every one of them. She became frightened that them laying down their lives was exactly what had happened.

Her stomach grumbled. The sun had risen completely and shone down on the world casting long morning shadows wherever its light touched. She wondered when she would be allowed to break fast. She went to her door and waved her hand over the side panel like she was shown and it slid open. Two women dressed as soldiers were standing outside her door. She didn't know why, but they reminded her of the Sheikah she had seen once in her father's court.

On seeing her, one of them touched the funny black device in her ear and said, "Zelda's awake and dressed."

The disembodied voice of Mister Woolsey came through loud enough for Zelda with her Hylian ears to hear although she suspected she wasn't supposed to, "Excellent. Is she wearing the clothes Doctor Keller left for her?"

The soldier glanced at her, "yes, sir." She replied.

"Good. Have her wait there. I'll inform Doctor Keller, and send her there." Mr. Woolsey replied.

The woman opened her mouth to speak, but Zelda informed her politely, "I heard, thank you." The woman nodded surprised.

About fifteen minutes later, Doctor Jennifer arrived and stepped into the apartment. Zelda had returned to the balcony view which had so moved her while she waited to watch this new world in front of her with fascination. Besides the seagulls, every once in a while she could see dolphins leap from the water in the distance, or other, larger cetaceans rise just to the surface and blow water in great spouts before they dove beneath once more.

Zelda then heard light footsteps on carpet and something more enter the apartment.

"Enjoying the view?" Doctor Jennifer asked brightly.

"Good morning, Doctor," Zelda said politely. "It's so different from Hyrule. I've always loved the sea, even though I see it so rarely. Our kingdom's capital is far from the coastline." Zelda told the doctor, turning to face her.

Dr. Jennifer had wheeled a cart with food on it into the apartment and began placing the food on the small table.

"You are very kind, Doctor, thank you." Zelda said.

"It's no problem, really. I haven't had breakfast yet either, so I thought maybe we could keep each other company this morning." The kind woman responded.

"I don't just mean with the food," Zelda smiled and gestured to her clothing, simple as it was, she realized she was thankful for not having to get back into the uncomfortable dress.

"Don't worry about," Doctor Jennifer smiled and waived it off, "We keep a few extra sets of clothes in the medical center just in case. On occasion we have to treat kids as well as adults who come through the gate. It's no big deal, I'm just glad I got the sizes right." She looked at the clothes which fit just a bit loosely, and then added, "more or less."

When the table was set, they both sat down to eat. In front of Zelda were eggs, ham, some kind of orange juice in a pitcher, a pot of steaming coffee and several flat round pieces of bread which Doctor Jennifer took two and smeared butter and a sweet smelling syrup on. Zelda did likewise, as well as taking some of the eggs and a slice of ham. She then took her fork and taste some of it, and it was heaven. She gave way to her hunger, which was more considerable than she realized, as she ripped into the food in front of her. How long had it been since she had eaten properly? They had fed her here, surely, hadn't they?

"It's good to see you've gotten your appetite back." Doctor Jennifer said with amusement.

"I'm sorry," Zelda said, pulling back a bit, "I don't mean to be rude."

"No, by all means, eat up. That's why I brought it." She smiled as she watched the girl devour everything in front of her and take more. "I thought it would be better to have breakfast here than the mess hall. There might be more than a few stares there."

"I see." Zelda replied, wiping her mouth. "I thought your people were used to having visitors who were not from your world."

"Well, we are," the woman said as she took a bite of eggs. "But you're kind of a different case. Remember Doctor Lee?"

Zelda nodded. The funny man who knew almost as much about her as she did.

"Well, he's not the only one who knows about you and your world from... other sources." She told her.

Zelda could tell she was trying to be tactful and not say too much. Perhaps that was just as well. Maybe she didn't want to know all of it.

"At any rate, Mister Woolsey also thought it would be best." The doctor then said.

"So, no more tours of the city then?" Zelda asked, knowing the answer.

"Not at the moment anyways." She answered apologetically.

They both continued eating and Doctor Jennifer poured herself a cup of the coffee. It seemed too warm that day to Zelda to be drinking such things, so she contented herself with the orange juice, which suited her well enough with its sweet yet tart taste.

They continued talking for some time after the food was gone. The doctor would ask about Hyrule and her family, and then she would tell her a little of her home in Wisconsin where her father still lived. Zelda learned that there was indeed land on Earth, huge continents which stretched from north to south and many billions of people. Many cities and people of many cultures and languages. It was almost unbelievable to her. Hyrule seemed small and insignificant by comparison, and yet she knew her world was larger than just her kingdom as well. She had been taught by her tutors of other lands and seas, even though she had never seen them. These people had the knowledge and means to explore and cover not only their world, but many others as well. And she had also learned that much of this knowledge was hidden from most of the people of Earth. That part of the conversation seemed a little uncomfortable to the Doctor.

"Why would you need to hide these things from your people?" Zelda asked.

"Not everyone is ready for these kinds of truths." The woman responded. "If the whole of Earth knew what we know, it would cause chaos, and we can't let that happen. We have to introduce these things slowly to let people get used to it first."

"So, your people don't know about this city then?" Zelda asked.

"No. Most of them don't. Only those who've been given permission to work here, and those higher up in our different governments know about it." Doctor Jennifer said.

"Would knowledge of my existence upset your world?" Zelda asked pointedly.

Jennifer looked distinctly uncomfortable at the question as she replied, "Most likely."

"I see." Zelda said. "So then it would be best for both our worlds that I return as quickly as possible, for many reasons."

"You could put it that way." The woman said, sipping her drink slowly.

"Doctor Keller," Mr. Woolsey's voice came through her earpiece breaking the silence which had grown.

"Yes," she responded touching it.

"Please bring Princess Zelda to the jumper bay, she's going on a little trip." He responded.

"Excuse me? A trip where?" Doctor Jennifer responded.

"Her 'hero' has arrived at the D'ni cavern site in New Mexico." Mr. Woolsey said. "He's been asking for her by name. Doctor Jackson is looking after him at the moment."

"My hero?" Zelda asked, taking the doctor by surprise.

Doctor Jennifer repeated the question.

"Yes, a nice young man armed with a sword and shield and dressed in green who answers to the name of Link. Tell the Princess he's very anxious to see her." Mister Woolsey replied.

"Link?" Zelda wondered out loud as the secret histories of Hyrule which her mother had left for her eyes only rushed into her mind like a flood.


End file.
